Breaking Free To Improvise

About Bulla Radio

Bulla Radio has existed for three years as a space to open a dialogue about the lives and creations of female and nonbinary artists who experiment with sound and music, straight from their voices and oral narration. The Bulla project is a platform based on radical conversation as documentation and as a means for activist participatory research.¹

Bulla Radio’s approach of no script, no cuts and live streaming gave me many challenges but also the freedom to improvise the dialogue and learn about my own analysis. It also enabled a space for guests to include a sound selection of their choice, without genre restrictions, that we comment on live in the sessions.

Bulla Radio has become a safe space for female and nonbinary sound producers to speak openly about training challenges, vulnerability, gender discrimination, techniques and different ways to acquire it, music theory, anticolonial practices and tips for learning. The result is now a total of 63 episodes (including dissemination and listening sessions) that were broadcast bi-weekly in real time via the Internet on the Mexican community radio station Radio Nopal. The participatory episodes add up to almost 100 hours of archived and unedited conversations with 44 people as guests/co-participants across 42 episodes, from June 2020 until the beginning of April 2023. Bulla is now a Spanish-speaking archive of considerable size and enables some possible reflections on sound experimentation and gender in Mexico.²

1. lisahunter, Emerald, Elke and Martin, Gregory. Participatory Activist Research in the Globalised World: Social Change Through the Cultural Professions. Dordrecht: Springer. 2013
2.  See https://radionopal.com/ and https://laurabalboa.com/Archive (accessed 2023-05-01).

The Challenges of Female and Nonbinary Visibility in Documentation

At the Latin American Studies Virtual Congress in 2022, I presented a timeline, derived from my personal files, of the range of events during my participation in sound art and improvisation scenes in Mexico City from 1999 until the present. The results confirmed my hypothesis about the extremely poor visibility of female artists in comparison to their male counterparts.³ The statistics and timeline are one way of showing gender discrimination and the lack of inclusion of women in sound and experimental music in Mexico. I don’t intend to turn the information into a female genealogy for two reasons: first, it goes against Bulla’s political, anti-colonial and feminist core; and second, because archiving relates to the availability and retrievability of data, while in many cases there is a difference between recorded history and events as they happened.

I had a hard time finding comprehensive records of female artists doing sound experimentation before 1999. Finding information about women composers who are no longer among us is laborious since archives are often incomplete. Some accounts—from historical data, musicology studies and journalism—have pointed to the work of women at specific moments in time. There are countercultural and non-conforming music scenes linked to genres such as rock, jazz and contemporary electronic music that have nurtured the participation of women and nonbinary people, including free jazz⁴, noise, ruido and feminopraxis ruidistas⁵, as well as live coding⁶, just to name a few.

3. Balboa, Laura. “Haciendo Bulla: Radio documentación de la escena de sonido experimental en México a través de una oralidad con perspectiva de género”. Paper delivered at LASA 2022: Latin American Studies Congress. 5–10 May 2022.
4.  Free jazz comes from a non-conformist way of playing in jazz practice that breaks its structural conventions with an experimental approach that originated in the second half of the twentieth century from musicians who tried concepts and idioms to build their own contributions in a liminal space to avoid following the interpretation dynamics from music composed by someone else. See Fonoteca Nacional. “Historias del jazz en México, la colección Atrás del Cosmos”. 2020. Available at https://contigoenladistancia.cultura.gob.mx/detalle/historias-del-jazz-en-mexico-la-coleccion-atras-del-cosmos (accessed 2022-04-05).
5. This is a compound term coined by PhD candidate, researcher and pianist Ana Mora who has investigated the creative and collective practices or praxis of noise or ruido by people who identify as women and nonbinary in Latin America, as well as the relationship between art, science, and technology. Feminopraxis ruidistas could be translated as “noisemaking praxis”. See Mora, Ana. “Feminopraxis ruidistas: Hacia una propuesta metodológica desde las prácticas sonoras experimentales en Nuestra América”. Paper presented at LASA 2022: Latin American Studies Congress. 5–10 May 2022.
6. Live coding is a performing art form and a creative technique that centres on the writing of source code and the use of interactive programming in an improvised way to create sound and music. See Collins, Nick, McLean, Alex, Rohrhuber, Julian and Ward, Adrian. “Live coding in laptop performance”. Organised Sound. Vol. 8. 2003. pp. 321–30. doi:10.1017/S135577180300030X; and Live coding women collective / colectivo de fémeninas live coders. 5 May 2022. Available at https://livecodera.glitch.me/ (accessed 2023-05-01).

Artists who are still alive need a space to present themselves on their terms. This is why orality and voiced testimonies provide a live quality to the Bulla Archive that can generate various degrees of information for refined analyses based on dissecting the conditions and practices of experimentation in sound.

Research In The Latin American Context And Bulla Today

The national and international visibility of some of the female-identifying composers, educators and musicians in Mexico—such as Brígida Alfaro, María de la Luz Oropeza, Alicia Urreta, Julia Alonso, María Garfias and Ana Ruiz—is weak compared to their male-identifying counterparts, even though their contributions have been valuable in composition, improvisation, education, interdisciplinary practices, electronic music and electroacoustics. Some recent research studies on them have been facilitated by female-identifying academics such as Dr. Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda (Mexico, Canada), the musician and musicologist Dr. Maby Muñoz Hénonin (Mexico), historian and musicologist Dr. Yael Bitrán (Chile, Mexico), composer Valeria Valle (Chile); and multidisciplinary sound artists, composers and musicians such as Ana María Romano (Colombia), Ana Gabriela Yaya (Argentina) and Alma Laprida (Argentina, USA); as well as musicians and PhD candidates such as Teresa Diaz de Cossio (Mexico), Amanda Gutiérrez (Mexico, Canada) and Ana Mora (Mexico); and academics such as Dr. Iracema de Andrade (Brazil, Mexico), Dr. Susan Campos Fonseca (Costa Rica) and research groups like the (Sono-soro)ridades collective⁷,  among others.

In the development of both the written and the audio piece, I divided this study into two main sections. In the first part, I focus on one of the most important feminist foundations of experimental music composition: the work of the Mexican pianist, composer and improviser Ana Ruiz (b. 1952, active since 1972) and her participation in co-founding the denominated first free jazz scene in Mexico in the early 1970s. In the second part, I focus on three women with a multidisciplinary education and practice who have incorporated experimental techniques into their work, as well as female participatory music-making in their performances: double bass player, documentarist and artivist Adriana Camacho (b. 1974); visual artist, multi-instrumentalist, improviser and producer Alda Arita (b. 1977); and multidisciplinary artist and improviser Albania Juárez (b. 1988).

Bulla Episodes no. 28: Ana Ruiz 

Bulla Episodes no. 27: Adriana Camacho

Bulla Episodes no. 25: Alda Arita

Bulla Episodes no. 47: Albania Juárez

7. As mentioned by Ana Mora, (Sono-soro)ridades was initiated by Gabriela Aceves and Amanda Gutiérrez as a critical framework to trace historical and production lines carried out by women and non-binary people with a feminist perspective of sound art in Mexico. The first proposal took place in a panel that included Laura Balboa, Lena Ortega, and Ana Mora at the II Encuentro Internacional de la Red Ecología Acústica México on 10 December 2020. See Mora, Ana. “Colectivas feministas en México y nuestra América: Hacia otros mundos sono-sororos posibles”. In Mujeres en la música en México: De la gesta individual a las colectivas feministas. Cuadernos de Música UNAM. Edited by Yael Bitrán Goren. Mexico: UNAM, 2022.

Breaking Free: Ana Ruiz Becomes a Self-Determined Composer 

Ana Ruiz distanced herself from a career in piano interpretation in music academia—with contemporary practices linked to Mexico but loaded with the Western art music canon—and ventured into experimentation, free improvisation, free jazz and especially something that Ana Ruiz describes as “composing freely”. Based on that conversation, I propose the concept free composition as a useful one for this research.

Elaborating on how Ana sees free composition, she states that for her silence is the realisation of freedom, a moment to escape the repetitive interpretation of piano works already composed by someone else, someone from a distant time. For her, free improvisation is a blank canvas, the opportunity to compose on the go, in the moment, to make sound without overthinking, to embrace emotions and thoughts, and to be able to sound, to become sound.

Ana tailored herself a career as a musician, composer and organiser of events, as well as a female creator who decided to raise her children in the sociocultural climate of the 1970s in Mexico. In feminist terms, it has not been discussed and mentioned enough that Ana is still an important node in welcoming diverse contemporary generations of women and nonbinary artists performing in free jazz, improvisation and sound experimentation. She serves as a mentor and colleague, and often as a friend and guide.

Transgenerational, Transfeminist and Transnational Acts of Support

One of the best examples of nurturing new generations of female artists as a feminist practice is Ana’s current relationship with sound artist and archivist Naima Karlsson, the granddaughter of Monika Marianne Karlsson, referred to in the audio essay as Moki Cherry, the multidisciplinary artist and foundational part of the Organic Music Societies project along with her partner, the jazz trumpeter Don Cherry. In these connections, we can reflect on the role of women and how the importance of their contributions is often supported and made visible by other women as an act of solidarity.

Naima took the responsibility of handling her grandmother’s archive, and OMS’s, to show the vast amount of work she did—from textile art to scenography, environments for concerts and workshops, using her background as a textile artist and fashion designer. She played sax and tambura, sang and contributed to the sound ecology of the OMS project, making repetitive sounds with her sewing machine while she was crafting complex pieces of fabric. She also blurred the lines between art and living, bringing the domestic into the nomadic and bringing domesticity into the museum, not to mention her interest in deconstructions and compositions from non-Western cultures into the mix.⁸

8. Kumpf, Lawrence, Karlsson, Naima and Nygren, Magnus. Organic Music Societies. New York: Blank Forms. 2021.

Breaking Free: The Equalizing Challenge in Improvisation Ensembles

For the younger women who are included in the second part of the audio essay, their education has not been provided by the National Conservatory of Music but by playing in different scenes and studying either on their own or in independent or private music schools. In most music conservatories in Mexico, to make a career out of playing an instrument admission at a young age is critical, and all those who do not have the economic means and a strong and early interest in music may have a lack of opportunity for a so-called validated professional musical career. Studying music elsewhere does not impede becoming a professional in creating music, and free improvisation is one of the practices and communities that provide and welcome that possibility.

Adriana Camacho

Adriana describes herself as an artivist, an artist who wants to make a change through her work. In her solo projects, she mentions her interest in topics such as travelling to oneiric and harmonious worlds. She ventured into music after the political complications and the danger she was exposed to in her activist documentary film-making career in Mexico.

Adriana’s relationship with her double bass is important. When she says she feels physically protected by her instrument, this brings up one of the most important topics in trans-feminist thought, activism and collective action: the extreme violence that women and the trans community face in Mexico and other Latin American countries. This is an international emergency. To say that a musical instrument serves as protection is to say that art emancipates Adriana to be able to cope with the situation in Mexico, reflecting on her particular context. It is a prompt to remind herself that she is in a dangerous place and despite that she decides to carry on, to carry her instrument around and perform.

Alda Arita

Alda is a visual artist, multi-instrumentalist, improviser and producer. She plays experimental music, free improvisation and free jazz in ensembles and solo projects, while describing herself as a sound explorer. She plays various instruments, such as guitar, trumpet, sitar, and flute; she makes video art and animations; she also does the sound production, including mastering and recording, and manages her own releases.

Alda cares about her community and tries to participate in all sorts of inclusive events and ensembles. She created the Las Cuervas trio with two fellow trans women musicians, Alda on guitar, Rebeca Palma on bass and Valis Ortiz (†) on synth. The visibility of trans people in experimental sound performances seems to be low, where discrimination and the social sphere in Mexico are extremely violent for trans people, impacting on their mental health, their wellbeing and survival. Unfortunately, the community of female musicians, nonbinary and trans folk has been affected by femicides, trans-femicides, suicides, sexual violence and forced disappearance by a never-ending ruling Mexican narco-state. Within this context, Alda still manages to talk warmly about her transition and welcomes the audience on Bulla Radio to become whatever they want to be in life.

Albania Juárez

In her own words, Albania is an artist who explores topics such as agroecology, mysticism and nature. Her sound work in ensembles includes field recordings and improvisation with the use of unconventional instruments (such as stones), as she defines them. She has a great interest in imagining archaic sounds or early pre-music manifestations and to listening in depth from an ecological standpoint to perform with sound objects in space. With her literature and visual art studies, she brings narrative ideas to sound performances and creates gestures to enact questions about what is nature and what is human.

Derived from the categorisation of unconventional instruments proposed by Albania, it is relevant to mention the heavy cultural significance of Western musical instruments in comparison to those Albania plays. It seems that in Mexico and other countries in Latin America, music academies have a significant colonial inheritance from Europe, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. In terms of understanding the discourse that Albania proposes, she needs to detach conceptually from European conventions, even if it is only a symbolic gesture to perform with the themes she is interested in. From an essential and acoustic point of view, any instrument is an object with sound-making potential—from an object produced for that reason in a certain culture to a tool for cutting—but if we focus on those that have more possibilities to detach from Western music conventions, we may be able to listen to Albania’s sketch to express and communicate with sound before the creation of the concept of music.

Female and NonBinary Emancipation in Experimental Sound

Many Bulla participants in Music Conservatory Studies—such as Sarmen Almond, Alina Maldonado, Gibrana Cervantes, Aimeé Theriot, Alexandra Cárdenas, Alejandra Hernández and Luz María Sánchez—have stated in past Bulla Radio episodes that they felt an identitarian distance from (Western) classical music in their formative studies. They enjoyed instrumental techniques and music theory, but they did not fully connect with the type of cultural expression they were taught. All of them decided to explore additional means and environments to work in. Some of these career decisions created experimental practices connected to specific contexts inside Mexico or abroad, like in the US or Europe. In most cases, these artists have positioned their work and themselves via their practice.

When sound experimentation is positioned as a practice in Mexico, the results and work derived from it can tell us something about the diverse cultural conditions of women and nonbinary artists from an intersectional point of view. The transversal link is embedded in the conditions under which experimental sound happens, but the results need to stand as unique contributions with their reflections and outcomes. I have found true female emancipation in communities such as live coding and free improvisation and this is why I created this research, taking the latter as a starting point to articulate my own voice as a researcher in a language that is not my native tongue. Even in research, I want us to create together.

The most important findings from this piece are the emancipation and legacy of self-determination in free composition provided by Ana Ruiz; the social, participatory and inclusive component of free improvisation ensembles from Adriana Camacho; the community-building in transgenerational and transgender acts of support and self-advocacy by Alda Arita; and the reflections on Western narratives and cultural propositions to build other possible sound ecologies by Albania Juárez.